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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: A.J. Mullen who wrote (4401)	5/1/1999 4:25:00 PM
From: RMiethe	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 29987

A.J. Mullen: if I may, you precisely miss the point about Globalstar. Globalstar is not a phone system that is to be compared with the convenience of QWEST, AT&T, Spring, and the like. These are phone systems in the First World Countries-- the "Developed Nations" as the World Bank likes to call us (developed in what sense, is of course, meant technologically). Those in the world who have not had the "convenience" of making a call from their five line Panasonic 900 Mhz cordless phone in their home-- and I refer to those in Eastern Europe, China, Northern Africa, and the like-- could not care a whit about the "convenience" you mention in your response to poster Valueman as being ingredient to a phone call. The very fact that they can have voice communications is a thousandfold increase, dare I say, to what they have now-- namely, no voice communications at all. And this goes for the agribusinesses in Latin America, the broad cattle grazing stretches in Australia where telephony is lacking (ask Vodaphone Network on that), and so on. Americans compare Globalstar to what they have in their car and home right now, and consider Globslstar's offering to be "crude" because of all the conveniences 70 years of terrestrial buildout have provided America. Globalstar Telecommunications couldn't care less about the American urban market. It's not meant for high population areas, never was, and never will be. Repeatedly the criticism of the Globalstar enterprise is made with American convenience as the criterion of criticism. "We Americans have this, Globalstar does not have this, therefore Globalstar is a pipe dream"-- or whatever. In conversations with satellite people I have had as a money manager who is long out the wazoo on Globalstar and Loral, I have been instructed that I need to travel the world, and see exactly what Globalstar, Hughes, Lockheed, and the Asian GEO systems mean by absence of telephony availability. I have not travelled the world in even the slightest way. But I know satellite people who have. I know no Wall Street analyst covering satellite telecommunications who has travelled the world either. I have asked them. That is why when it comes to this issue of world telephony I am careful to weigh what others say about Wall Street research on this matter. The point of my comments here is that one must not confuse Globalstar with what we Americans have in our telephony services. Iridium was never meant as a satellite system for the populations Globalstar is targeting. Edward Staiano, forced out of Iridium because he could not market his product, said this the very first conference call he held with Wall Street courtesy of Merrill Lynch in June of 1997 after Iridium went public. Their market is not Globalstar's. So, without getting into the technical questions about link margin and the rest (although I am told, to answer CommSatman, that higher antenna gain on the Globalstar phone eliminates the link margin issue he mentions-- however, I am not technically expert at such issues [perhaps Mr. Winn can add to this]), the Globalstar issue is providing reasonable and respectable telephony at a reasonable cost to those who have never been able to have the convenience of making a call over hundreds of miles instead of writing a letter to accomplish the same task a simple phone call would-- and this applies to businesses as well as individuals. Maybe, as I was told, an investor in Globalstar should have first made a world travel trip the announced Globalstar targeted markets before investing in it to see whether Globalstar was misleading investors. As I have said, I have not made that trip-- but I also am not naieve enough to think that the convenience of my 5 line Panasonic 900 Mhz cordless home phone was ever what a potential Globalstar customer in Morocco was ever expecting from Globalstar.